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Read the last part here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=381696
They were through. Major Wang Shaxi had crossed the DMZ along the great holes the Korean II Corps had blasted not two days prior. Now it was time to finish the job and reach the Bukhan crossing sites.
The radio reports from his forward element had not begun to prepare Shaxi for the scene in the valley below him. He had painfully worked what was left of his battalion--now designated as a forward detachment to the last two divisions in Ma Shiwen's 63rd Group Army--through the confusing network of roads southeast of Kumhwa. There had been airstrikes on the small city, and funnels of black smoke rose high into the blue sky behind his tanks. Shaxi labored to keep clear of the action there, following the path blazed by Pang and his reconnaissance company. Their mission was to reach the Bukhan at Gapyeong, and not to get bogged down in local actions unless it proved absolutely unavoidable.
Captain Pang had reported to Shaxi about the backed-up traffic north of Hwacheong, which was along the main highway artery Shaxi hoped to exploit. The company commander had become emotional over the radio, searching for adjectives, describing the scene up ahead in apocalyptic terms. But Shaxi had only his mission in mind. He had ordered Pang to stop acting like a nervous little virgin and keep moving.
As Shaxi's tank broke over the ridge the view forced him to halt his march column. Pang had not been succumbing to emotionalism. Stretching across the landscape, barely three kilometers to his west, civilian vehicles packed the vital highway, all struggling to move south. There was so little vehicular motion in the jammed-up lanes that, at first glance, the column seemed to be at a complete standstill. But once his eyes focused, slow nudging movements became apparent, really more nervousness than actual forward progress. Along what had once been a northbound lane, a column of military supply vehicles smoldered where they had been caught in the open by Chinese airpower. here and there, clusters of wrecked or burned civilian cars and light trucks further thickened the consistency of the traffic flow. Some vehicles had evidently been abandoned by panic-stricken occupants, and on both sides of the road, a straggling line of civilians with suitcases, packs, and bundles trudged along. Shaxi judged that this was the last wave fleeing southeast from Kumhwa and the border areas, trying to get across the Bukhan to an imagined safety less than fifty kilometers away. It was a pathetic scene, but Shaxi forcibly reined in his sympathies. The enemy would have put the Chinese people in a similar condition, if not worse, if they had pushed north of the Yalu. He doubted a South Korean or American tank battalion commander would have wasted as much thought on the situation as he had already done. He pictured his enemies as fascist-leaning mercenaires, fighting for money, unbothered by human cares.
Shaxi gave the order to move out, deploying cautiously into combat formation to facilitate a safe crossing of the high fields that tapered down to the highway. He still had no heavy air-defense protection, and he worried about getting caught in the open. He ordered the artillery and drone battery to remain on the ridge, covering the movement of the tanks and IFVs. As he saw the line of civilians stretch into the distance, his heart fell sharply. He had imagined that, once in the enemy's rear, the roads would be clear. Now he could not see how he to remain on schedule.
But Shaxi figured that, at a minimum, he could hug the refugee column, exploiting them as passive air defense. The enemy would have to bomb their own people to hit Shaxi's tanks. Shaxi was far from certain the American officers would hesitate for long, but it offered a better chance than driving through open fields all day long. Shaxi wondered if the Americans had perhaps even planned this, using the South Korean people to slow down the progress of the Chinese Army on the roads. Well, he would use this weapon against them, too.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Rena. She did not fit here, but her image would not go away. She scolded him, flashing her high Uighur temper, demanding that he see the mass of frightened humanity down on the road as a crowd of terrified individuals, deserving of safety and protection. But Shaxi's focus on the mission soon shut out her voice.
His tattered battalion unfolded from the high ground and the crown of trees, opening into a quick, if somewhat ragged, battle formation. The self-propelled guns sidled off to firing positions; the drones went into the air, and his tanks and infantry fighting vehicles plowed towards the valley floor in a long, waving, ripple of steel.
Tanks sprayed dirt and mud in their trails as they maneuvered across the declining slope. Turrets smoothly wheeled to challenge the flanks. Shaxi saw only the readiness, the will to combat, ignoring the unevenness of the line. He knew that his demanding approach to training, despite the resentment it caused, had paid off. And moreover, the warriors who had survived the morning's engagement had a changed feel to them now. Shaxi could feel it even through the thick blocks of reactive armor. It was, he knew, the feel of men who had drank the blood of their enemies, and liked the taste.
Along the highway, still more than a kilometer distant, the refugees on foot began to run at the sight of the skirmish line of Chinese armor. First a few of them ran; then other runners gathered around the first clusters like swarming insects, most discarding their last possessions.
The response surprised Shaxi. It had never occured to him that this slow river of humanity should be afraid of his battalion. The idea of intentionally hurting them had never crossed his mind. For a moment, Rena came back, and he saw the world through the fear-widened eyes of the South Korean refugees; Rena's voice was now interspersed with imagined screams.
Shaxi finally relented, and was about to redirect his formation toward a secondary road heading off to the south, when the first muzzle blast flashed from across the valley.
Beyond the stream of fleeing civilians, an enemy force of unknown size either had been waiting in ambush or had just reached the wooded ridge on the opposite side of the valley. Other muzzle blasts flared in quick succession, and Shaxi's tanks maneuvered to take advantage of the sparse local cover. They had been caught fully exposed on the slope.
On his right, Shaxi saw one of his tanks erupt, its turret lifting like the top of a volcano. Some of his platoons had begun to fire back, but the enemy was at extreme range, and they would have to halt to have any hope of hitting their targets.
A dull boom; then another of his tanks burned. Good gunners, Shaxi thought. The bastards.
His first instinct was to stop and pull everyone back up into the treeline. His ridge was considerably more commanding than the one occupied by the enemy.
"Attention," Shaxi called into the battalion net. "Do not return fire unless you have positive ID'd a target. Captain Xia," he said, dispensing with callsigns, "you are to pick out targets for volley fire. Artillery, you and the drones are to suppress the enemy position along the treeline. Captain Lan, you are to--"
Shaxi froze, then stared hard into his periscope. The enemy was leaving the treeline. It was senseless. They had good, concealed, firing positions. Now, they were putting themselves at the same disadvantage Shaxi's vehicles were in.
Then he got it. They were trying to draw fire away from the refugee column. Again, Shaxi was startled by the perception of what his battalion was trying to do. But he did not waste time on moral philosophy. The enemy had just told him, frankly, where their values lay.
"Everybody," Shaxi called over the radio net. "All tanks and fighting vehicles, forward now. Full combat speed, get in among the refugee traffic. Captain Lan, dismount your men and use the cars and trucks for cover. Fire smoke grenades and move, quickly. All tanks, battle line on the highway. Now!"
His vehicle lurched forward at his command. Shaxi triggered the reloaded smoke grenade canisters and drove headlong into the rising puffs. His vehicle bounced wildly, but Shaxi was able to grab the hatch lever and push it open. The smoke made him cough, but he did not want to seal himself in the belly of the tank. After losing control of the morning's fighting, he was afraid to lose control of this engagement as well.
Beyond the thin screen of smoke, the column of cars soon blocked the enemy's fields of fire. Shaxi looked quickly to the right and left, unsure how many tanks should be there now, but satisfied with the grouping he saw. Quick armored infantry fighting vehicles nosed their sharp prows in among the tanks, losing drill formation in the headlong dash for the highway.
Shaxi's tank roared through an area of low ground from which the column of automobiles on the built-up road actually stood higher than his turret. Then the tank slanted back upward, heading for the multi-colored line of fine Korean cars. The last civilian drivers deserted, leaving doors wide open in their haste. Shaxi's tank shot up over the berm of the road and slammed down on the pavement of the highway. His driver only halted the tank after its frontal plating had crumpled a small white van.
The meadow beyond the road had filled with running figures, their bright luggage like confetti thrown over the green fields. The refugees scrambled toward their own forces. But now the tables had turned. The enemy tanks had lost the race to the road, and they stood embarrassed in the open fields, uncertain sentinels attempting to cover their own. Shaxi could see the enemy unit was weaker than his own after all, its vehicles scarred by combat and spread thinly across the long slope.
"Get them!" Shaxi screamed into the mike, "get them while they're in the open. Don't let them get away. Platoon commanders, select targets for volley fire." He felt himself bursting with adrenaline; Rena's voice was almost completely gone.
Satisfied with his battalion's positions, he closed the turret hatch. "Target," Shaxi said, dropping into his position behind the optics. There was a tank at a perfect oblique angle, a clean flank shot. "Range, eleven hundred meters."
"Eleven hundred meters."
"Correct to eleven-fifty. Selecting sabot."
"Eleven-fifty, sabot loaded."
"Fire." Shaxi's tank rocked backwards, and before it settled, the enemy tank dazzled with sparks. A moment later, its turret flew skyward. Without looking down, Shaxi high-fived his gunner. Then he scanned the fields for another target.
His optics found a changed scene. Most of the civilians had dropped into the high grass, caught in the middle of the battle. Shaxi saw one running group jerk into contorted positions and fall. Someone had intentionally gunned them down.
"Comrade Commander, target!"
Shaxi saw the tank. Lumbering down, as if to rescue the surviving refugees, its long gun fired above the bodies prostrate in the grass. It looked like a defiant, protective lioness. Shaxi understood, even sympathized with the commander of the enemy vehicle. The maneuver was brave, but suicidal. Shaxi fixed the target with his laser rangefinder.
His headset grew chaotic with a litany of calls, mostly cocky variations of "target neutralized". Shaxi tuned them out until he had fired on the lone, brave enemy tank. Two other tanks also fired on it in quick succession, and one of the three shells struck the magazine, sending the entire hull skyward and flipping the tank over. With all its hatches now stuck in the earth, what surviving crew remained would be trapped and burned alive.
The surviving enemy vehicles pulled back into the distant treeline, only to be finished off by Shaxi's supporting artillery battery and drones, their anti-armor submunitions and guided missiles raining down like tiny balls of lava.
The firing of tank guns disappeared. It was a swift engagement, determined by the single factor of Shaxi's tanks beating the enemy to the highway by around half a minute. Shaxi searched the horizon for any last targets, but all of the visible enemy vehicles remained stationary, either blazing or smoking heavenward. Then he watched as a lone civilian rose and ran up the hillside, only to be tossed about by sustained assault rifle fire. Shaxi watched as though the action was simply a scene from a movie. Then he snapped back to his senses.
"Cease fire, cease fire!" he shouted. "I will personally shoot the next man who fires on a civilian."
He opened his turret, climbing up into open air only to be greeted by choking black smoke. At first, he thought his tank was on fire, that it had been hit and he had not even realized it; then he saw that a car had taken a round for him and burned just to one side of his roadwheels. The heat seared Shaxi's cheeks. His vehicle, already battered, now wore a cloak of black soot.
The continuing volume of small-arms fire alarmed Shaxi. There was nothing left to shoot at--and there were far too many shouts and screams.
He dropped back into the turret, ordering his driver to reverse out of the gasoline fire beneath them. Then he called his subordinates and ordered them to get their men under control, to halt all firing immediately. The firing did not stop. In a rage, he stripped off his headset and drew his personal defense weapon as the tank stopped in the low ground beside the highway. Then he climbed out of the turret and jumped down from the tank, trotting towards the greatest density of noise.
As he walked, submachinegun at the ready, he saw countless automobiles on fire, or wrecked in their last, desperate attempts to flee. Between drifting curtains of smoke, islands of clarity revealed dead and badly wounded drivers and passengers, slumped over steering wheels or spilling from opened doors. Other civilians lay scattered about the highway, some of them pancaked by armored treads. A thin woman's flowered skirt lofted on the wind, dropping high up on the back of her sprawled legs. Shaxi clenched his teeth, then released the safety on his weapon.
Beyond the next drape of smoke, Shaxi surprised a group of mechanized infantry troops with a young girl. They had torn off her skirt and panties, leaving her clad only in a blouse, and they were teasing her, driving her screaming from one man to another. The girl wailed in mortal terror, and the men, his men, laughed. Then one of the soldiers pushed the others aside and began pawing at her blouse while fumbling with his pants, and the girl shrieked in a foreign language.
Shaxi fired at the ground, putting the bullet very close to the girl's tormentor.
All of the men turned to face him, one even lifting his assault rifle. As soon as they recognized an officer, they all straightened, backing away as if it was only an accident that she and they were in the same place. The soldier who had raised his weapon quickly lowered it.
"You bastards!," Shaxi shouted at them. "Shameless... inhman... scum! What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
None of the soldiers responded. Shaxi cursed himself empty, then could find no sensible words to express himself, and a difficult silence enveloped them. He almost launched into an angry series of platitudes about their duty and the mission and trust of a PLA soldier. But this was all too immediately human and terrible for classroom phrases.
Shaxi collected his breath, shaking his head in disgust. "All of you. Get back to your vehicles. Now."
The soldiers obeyed immediately. Shaxi watched them go, submachinegun pointed at their backs. He did not fully trust these strangers now.
And yet... they were his soldiers. They had fought together, and more importantly, would undoubtedly be forced fight for each other again and again before the war ended.
Shaxi safetied his weapon and turned to the girl, embarrassed more by what his soldiers had done than by her nakedness. He took care to look only at her face, which was red and terrified beyond the range of normal expression. Shaxi picked up her discarded clothing, holding them out to her. She backed nervously against a smashed car, as though she expected Shaxi to become her next tormentor.
"Go," Shaxi said, pushing the bundle of fabric into her hands. "Get out of here. Your people are up there," he pointed, wishing he could tell her in her language.
"Go," he barked. He did not know what else to do. There were still shots and cries, and he had no doubt that his experience of what his soldiers were really like had not yet come to an end. He wanted to get away from here, away from this lost girl. But he was afraid to leave her alone.
The girl hurriedly dressed and backed away; Shaxi turned around and began walking down the highway. Then he heard her scream again. He found her at the edge of the highway, facing the now-silent ridgeline from where her would-be guardians had come. She had stopped at a drainage ditch trailing away from the raised berm at the other side of the highway. In it was a tumbled clutter of dead bodies.
Shaxi felt his stomach crawling up his throat again. He forced it down and turned to the girl, expression softening. "Go," he pleaded, pointing the way with his weapon. Visibility was far too good, despite the residue of battle smoke, and he worried that enemy aircraft would descend upon them like the wrath of a vengeful God. He knew he had to get his troops back under control, to get moving again.
The girl finally understood him. She began to pick her way down between the corpses. As her foot touched one of them, the body moved with a life of its own, and Shaxi realized that, surely, there were many wounded along the column and out in the field. But he had no assets to cope with that issue now, and he still had a mission to fulfill. He struggled to shut his mind to the rising guilt.
The major stepped back behind the cover of an abandoned vehicle and watched the girl leave. From behind, her thin legs reminded him, uncomfortably, of Rena. As she worked her way up through the field, someone fired a single shot; the girl flung an arm into the air, as if waving to someone in the distance, and dark blood splashed from the hollow under her shoulder. An instant later she collapsed, disappearing in the shimmering grass.
 
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Captain Xia had been more successful than his commander. Shaxi found it a small consolation that none of his tankmen had joined in the free-for-all with the mechanized infantry. At least the men he had trained himself remained disciplined soldiers, he thought.
Then he summoned forth Captain Lan, the commander of the attached mechanized infantry company, and threatened him with a "court-martial under wartime conditions in accordance with the provisions of Article 20" if he lost control again. Failure to act, under battlefield circumstances, was punishable by summary execution. Shaxi made the threat as his anger peaked, and as he saw how deeply the episode had shaken Lan, he regretted it. None of the mechanized infantry officer's classes or unit experience had prepared him for this. Captain Lan stuttered, half-begging, insisting that such a thing would never--could never--happen again.
Shaxi looked him in the eyes and thought of how many times he had been told war made boys into men. Yet the very opposite, he thought, seemed true. Men who swaggered across the parade ground and bullied their way through the administrative rigors of peacetime soldiering became as helpless as children in the face of battle. Shaxi thought again of Lieutenant Colonel Min, his idiotic, corrupt, regimental commander, and of Senior Lieutenant Bo, the boy who had succumbed to panic and led his company to their doom. Now Lan seemed so terrified Shaxi wondered if he would go into shock. Where in the program of instruction did they teach you how to handle officers who went to pieces in combat? Or who were frightened into stasis by the unexpected behavior of their men? Having begun raging at Lan, Shaxi found himself spending precious time in an attempt to rebuild the officer's confidence, to put him back in control of himself and his men. He assured the captain that there would be a chance to make up his shortcomings at the river, if not before, although he knew that there would be a price to pay for this massacre--Shaxi could find no other word for it--and that he and Captain Lan were the two officers most likely to face a military tribunal.
"It's all right," Shaxi said. "The men are back in their squad groups with their vehicles. All you have to do is go through the motions. They'll listen to you, they've got it out of their systems. Just show them you're in control."
But the mechanized infantryman could not control his hands well enough to light a cigarette. Shaxi lit it for him, then guided it into the other man's mand. Lan's fingers felt like electric wires, frantic with too much current. He gripped the cigarette so hard that the small paper tube bent as he jammed it between his lips. Shaxi turned his back, unable to spare another moment. Lan would have to make it on his own, as would everyone one of them, in the end.
Shaxi had lost one additional tank and two infantry fighting vehicles, along with most of their crew members. He loaded his wounded, along with any nearby wounded refugees, into a pair of large vans, then put a combat medic in charge of two riflemen who claimed they could drive. Shaxi directed the medic to retrace the detachment's route as best as he could, stressing that it was essential to put enough distance between his charges and the scene of the engagement to disassociate the injured men from the massacre. He worried that any enemy forces or even civilians in the area would take vengeance on his wounded. Shaxi wished them luck, unhopeful.
Then he moved along his disordered line of vehicles, shouting at officers and men to mount up, to regroup their platoons. He screamed and cursed at them all until his voice began to fail, and even then he forced the mingled commands and obscenities out of his raw throat. Shaxi sensed that the only way to hold his dwindling unit together was by sheer force of will.
The unit pulled together. The vehicles had a battered, overloaded look, a caravan of military gypsies. Camouflage nets trailed over decks, and stowage boxes had been torn open. Vehicle fenders had twisted into chaotic shapes, and cartridge casings littered every flat surface on the infantry fighting vehicles. The self-propelled guns worked their way down from the ridge, and at Shaxi's press of button on the laser transmitter, the little column began to move again. He had heard nothing from Pang's advance element, but he contented himself with the thought that he had told the company commander to use the radio only to warn of trouble ahead, so the quiet was a positive sign.
Shaxi direct his vehicles to maintain twenty-meter intervals, but the difficulty of moving through refugee traffic soon squeezed the distance down to an average of less than ten. He allowed crowding as long as they marched immediately beside the panic-stricken traffic, now sensing that his enemy would not stage an air attack against his column as long as it hugged living refugees.
He had issued strict orders to cause no unnecessary damage. But the panic that flowed like a bow wave in front of the armor caused the refugees to harm themselves in their desperation, and collisions and crushings proved unavoidable. Shaxi clenched himself as tightly as possible, forcing his mind not to accept the implications of the string of small tragedies that marked the path of his battalion. He peered forward, unseeing, as his war machines rumbled south. He forced his eyes up to the sky and the rising line of mountains that hit the Bukhan, shutting out everything but the mission of reaching and crossing the river.
Several times, enemy aircraft boomed overhead, but their rockets and bombs never sought Shaxi. He did not know whether or not they were even aware of his column, whether their ordnance was predestined for other, greater than threats than the one his presence posed. He only knew the sudden intervals of terror, almost impossible to master, as the jets screamed down the highway, seemingly aimed straight for his tanks, only to blast on by to the north.
Intermittently, Shaxi's forward detachment surprised enemy soldiers in stray transport vehicles or perched along the side of the road, tasked to administer the rear area. Some attempted to fight it out; Shaxi's vehicles cut them down. Others, astonished, simply raised their hands up high and went ignored. Shaxi refused to permit his tiny force to be diverted. He wondered what had become of the reconnaissance element; surely these men had already tried to surrender to Captain Pang? When he tried to raise him on the radio, there was no answer. Neither was there any sign of his passage. Shaxi relegated the problem to his list of lesser concerns so long as things were going well.
The column seemed to be touring the guts of the enemy formations now, the individually unimportant targets that join in a great combination to make a modern army function. Chinese tanks and infantry vehicles simply raked the sites with machine-gun fire from the move. The only sharply focused efforts at destruction were directed against enemy vehicles with long-range antennae in evidence. Shaxi did not intend to give the enemy any free intelligence on his location. When the path to the south led his tanks around a congested village and right through middle of an Amerian vehicle-repair site, Shaxi almost lost control of his boys again. The target seemed too rich to be passed by, crowded with equipment and techicians, and his men took it upon themselves to destroy as much as possible. Shaxi screamed into his microphone, whipping his offiers back into column formation with more curses and threats. Even as he shouted, he wondered how much longer he would be able to keep it up, how long his willpower would endure. The he barked another command and forced his self-doubt down into a private dungeon. The unit pulled away from the repair-site, spraying suppressive light-weapons fire in its wake to keep the Americans from employing any hand-held antitank weapons.
Shaxi felt certain that the enemy must know his location by now, and he pounded at the rim of his turret hatch when another clot of refugees at a valley crossroads brought his tanks to a halt. Threats and warning shots failed to undo the knot, and Shaxi finally directed his driver to simply batter the civilian cars out of their path. The destruction seemed vicious and senseless and unavoidable to Shaxi. As if in punishment, one of Captain Lan's infantry vehicles threw a track as it attempted to work its way up out of a field and across a lateral road. There was no time to repair it, though the operation would have been simple, and Shaxi ordered the crew to mount up with their more fortunate comrades, then for the vehicle to be shot to pieces.
Shaxi felt as though fate were chipping away at him, defying him to reach the river. Yet there was good fortune, too. His tanks were obviously moving faster than the enemy could react, and none of the bridges over the tertiary streams had been blown. The passage of local water gaps, which might have held up the column, merely involved clearing off local refugee traffic. And as Shaxi's vehicles raced past still more American and Korean support sites, it was apparent that none of them had been forewarned. The enemy was losing control of his operational depths without even knowing it.
Captain Pang finally reported in. His advance element, intended to provide security and reconnaissance for the main column, had long since branched off on another route to the southwest, weaving into the mountains. That at least partially explained to Shaxi why the enemy was so consistently unprepared for his arrival. Pang swore he had been trying to call in for hours but had been unable to raise Shaxi on the net, probably because the intervening mountains had blocked out reception. Shaxi lost his temper. He could not understand how Pang could have diverged so widely from the anticipated route. Pang made a series of excuses, but the most telling point was that, despite his rash decision, the company commander was within a half-hour's march of the Bukhan bridge at Gapyeong. He had found an open road through the hills. Accepting the situation, despite his annoyance, Shaxi ordered Pang to push on for the bridgehead without delay and link up with the air-assault forces.
Shaxi could not sort out his feelings with any clarity. Part of him tensed with jealousy that Captain Pang had pushed so far ahead of the main body. By sticking to the most obvious route, Shaxi had lost time in the exodus of refugees. Pang had almost reached the objective, while he was accomplishiing little more than frightening a few American mess sergeants. Additionally, Shaxi felt newly vulnerable now that he was certain he had no reconnaissance force in front of his column; his mind filled with images of ambushes and sudden death. Still, he decided that it would not do to stop and push forward another reconnaissance element. His force was far too small. Shaxi decided to alter his course to reach the river valley as soon as possible. He calculated that he could strike the river at Gangchon-ri, then work west through the river valley. He reasoned that the refugee flow would have little reason to move laterally. In any case, he wanted to get clear of the mountain valleys.
The afternoon sun beat high overhead. Shaxi spoke the decision. All the consequences could be sorted out later. The repercussions from the massacre along the highway were likely to be so bad that Shaxi reasoned he could do little to worsen the situation. It was time to take risks. Even if they were to court-martial and execute him, Shaxi thought, grimly, they would not do it before he reached the river.
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Shaxi's force seized the Bukhan River bridge at Gangchon-ri almost by accident. It had not been part of the plan; the objective remained the crossing site at Gapyeong. But just as the remains of Shaxi's unit straggled down out of the hills toward the river road junction at Gangchon-ri, Captain Pang radioed in with news both good and bad. He had managed to link up with air-assault forces on the near bank at Gapyeong. But hard fighting continued at the crossing site, and he could not get his armored vehicles across the bridge because it lay in a direct line of fire from enemy positions on high ground just to the west. The enemy had not managed to blow the bridge before the air-assault forces seized bridgeheads on both banks, but now they were shelling it with everything they had, trying to drop it into the water or at least prevent anyone from crossing it. Still, the artillery could be managed. It was the direct fire threat that kept them off the bridge itself. The twin Chinese bridgeheads could not move across the bridge to support each other, and Captain Pang suspected the enemy would counterattack soon, as waiting meant dealing with more Chinese forces.
The tension in Pang's voice reassured Shaxi's battered ego. There were problems to be solved, and Major Wang Shaxi was the one to solve them.
The map showed a bridge at Gangchon. If intact, its seizure would allow Shaxi to move up behind the enemy on the southern bank of the river. If the bridge was blown, or if he failed, he risked losing precious time fighting back out of the town, perhaps even losing his force. But he could not see how his vehicles would make much difference if they simply marched up to the same near-bank bridgehead that Pang had reached. Shaxi took one last hard look at the map, inspecting the road net on the south bank of the river. There appeared to be a direct load along the Bukhan that would bring him out into the enemy's rear--if he could get across.
Shaxi decided to lead his shrunk column directly for the bridge. He hoped to achieve surprise. Immediately, everything went wrong.
On the outskirts of Gangchon, his tanks hit another traffic jam. More refugee traffic had been held up in an effort to evac an American artillery column to the south bank of the Bukhan. Shaxi ordered his tankmen to open fire on the multiple-rocket launchers, then sweep the support vehicles with machine-gun fire. The firefight threw brilliant lines of color across the sky, while the explosions of on-board magazines and soft-skinned support vehicles soon decorated the edge of the town with a garden of fire. Shaxi didn't even want to engage them, but they were in his way; yet, as they destroyed the American column, the wrecks blocked further progress.
"Xiao Lan," Shaxi called into his microphone, "get those little bastards of yours out of their vehicles and go for the bridge. Just follow the main road. I'll try to work the tanks around, but get to the damned bridge before they blow it."
Lan acknowledged the order. His voice sounded tense, but slightly more calm than when Shaxi had been threatening him with a battlefield court-martial. Shaxi hoped Captain Lan would be able to do his job this time.
Then Shaxi led the tanks in a detour around the back of the town, looking for another way in. He feared getting bogged down in street fighting, where a few antitank grenadiers could end his mission on the spot, but he saw no alternative path to the bridge. Between two burning American ammunition haulers, he spotted a side street that gaped open, inviting them into the town. Shaxi briefly closed his hatch, threading his tank through the firecracker-like secondary explosions from the ammo trucks. When he reemerged, he found his tank in a residential section, chewing curbs into dust and grinding down fences and small trees. From a distance of several hundred meters, Shaxi felt more secondary blasts rippling through the stricken American artillerymen. He ordered his self-propelled battery to assume hasty positions on the edge of town. There was no point in dragging them through the side streets behind his tanks.
The streets wound in arcs and twists. In his urgency to reach the bridge, Shaxi turned down a street that soon narrowed dangerously. The buildings converged like a vise against the sides of his tank; the bent fender screeching like a banshee against the concrete. When Shaxi looked behind himself, he saw the looming black shapes of battalion tucked in so closely that it would take an hour to back them up and turn around.
"Can you make it?" Shaxi asked his driver.
"I don't know, Comrade Commander."
"Go," Shaxi said. "Let's try it."
The tank's exhaust coughed, like a giant clearing his throat. Then, in a moment, they were through. Released, the treads shot forward.
"Stop," Shaxi shouted. "Halt. Back up." He had caught a glimpse of something as they rolled across an intersection.
He guided his driver backward just as the next tank in line came up in the rear. The vehicles almost collided. But off to the left, down another, blessedly wider, alley, Shaxi could see the dark span of an intact bridge rising against the sky.
Shaxi helped his driver to turn the vehicle in the cramped space, sweating, shifting his eyes from the walls around him to the bridge again and again. He expected it to explode at any moment.
"Captain Lan," Shaxi called. "Can you hear me? Where are you?"
The infantry officer did not respond. Shaxi wondered if he had even taken a dismount radio with him.
As his tank nosed out into the open near the deck of the bridge Shaxi could see the vivid traces of action back in the center of the town. The guardians of the bridge were giving Lan a tough time, but they had left the bridge itself virtually undefended. A few American traffic controllers fired their small arms at the tank, forcing Shaxi down behind the shield of his hatch cover, but his tanks' machine guns soon swatted them into the river. As the next tanks in column came up behind him, Shaxi ordered his driver forward. They had approached the bridge at an awkward angle, and it proved difficult to maneuver up onto the deck of the bridge. To his rear, the next tank worked its pivots.
It was possible, he realized, that the Americans were set to blow the bridge, that they were only holding off until Chinese vehicles filled its span before dropping everything into the river. But he could not wait for Lan's dismounted troops to work their way up and check for explosive charges. Success at Gapyeong could be a matter of minutes, of seconds. At the same time, Shaxi's overwhelming emotion was not fear, but a peculiar sort of joy, of fervor. He had reached the river. If he had to go, this was as fine a moment as he could imagine.
The bridge had cleared of traffic during the assault; on it, Shaxi saw only a single broken-down Humvee. He rode high in the turret again, ready with the last few belts in his machine gun, sensing that he had just become a part of history, and it filled him with a thrilling bigness.
He looked to the rear. His second tank followed him, and a third was steering around the wreckage on the bridge. Suddenly, small-arms fire broke out from the shadowy clutter of buildings on the far shore, and random shots pinged off the glacis of Shaxi's tank. He dropped back inside the turret, buttoned up, and, after seeing that there were no vehicles on far side, ordered his gunner to hold fire. They were too low on ammo to waste a single shot, and they would need to fight their way into Gapyeoung. Shaxi decided to simply race through the funnel of the urban area.
"Captain Xia, lead your company behind me across the bridge. Hold fire unless you need to suppress antitank infantry or engage enemy vehicles." Then he paused, adjusting the headset. "Captain Lan, can you read me? I need you to hold the bridge at all costs."
Static. Ghosts. Shaxi decided to move on without him, hoping that Lan would simply understand what he needed to do without orders. Shaxi did not intend to wait. He would take his remaining tanks to Gapyeong. The mechanized infantry, the artillery, everyone else could remain at Gangchon-ri. Nothing, not even unit integrity, was more important than time.
Shaxi's tank rolled off the bridge. Roaring up the canyon of shops and houses, he paid out a few rounds of machine-gun fire, hoping to discourage any anti-tank grenadiers. A bizarre-looking vehicle in his viewport baffled him for a moment. Then he realized that the crossing site was well-protected, but against the wrong threat; his tanks had just driven into a Korean air-defense unit.
Shaxi managed to contact his self-propelled battery, which lay on the other side of the river now, deployed in an apple orchard.
"Poplar, we are over the bridge. We just passed a Korean air-defense unit and scattered infantry. Wait five minutes for us to clear out, then open up on the southern bank of the river. Trap them in a shrinking box barrage of HE and incendiaries. Next, use your long-range radio set to contact any higher level station you can, and tell them we got the bridge at Gangchon and are heading down the south bank to secure the Gapyeong bridge. Finally, track down Captain Lan, and tell him to hold the Gangchon bridge, to the last man if need be. Use your drones to support his assault through the near bank. Do you read me?"
"Roger."
Then Shaxi's last tank reported with bad news. "Mustang Actual, this is Mustang One-Six, I've thrown a track making the pivot up onto the bridge."
Shaxi sensed that he could not wait for a repair, and he wanted the artillery to neutralize the far bank before the air-defense unit could move.
"Mustang One-Six, stay where you are and support the mechanized infantry. You are now subordinate to Captain Lan."
"Acknowledged."
Shaxi decided to raise Captain Pang and tell him help was en route. "Mustang Three, this is Mustang Actual, do you read?"
"Actual, this is Three. We're still on the northwest bank. No sign of an assault yet, although our airborne buddies are getting mighty nervous. Where are you guys?"
"We just crossed the Gangchon bridge and are heading up the southern bank. We'll hit the enemy defenders from behind. ETA five minutes. Just hang on."
Shaxi's handful of tanks shot their way onto the high ground south of Gapyeong with their last rounds. One last, vital, time, they managed to surprise the enemy, catching a series of tank and IFV positions in the rear. The American commander had positioned his forces with overlapping kill zones on the main highway bridge to the west, but they had become so preoccupied with the task that they totally neglected the possibility of a threat from behind. Shaxi's tanks destroyed every vehicle on the hill in less than twenty seconds.
Hurriedly, he radioed Pang again.
"Tell everyone to hold their fire. Friendlies coming in, red and yellow flares."
Then he split his tiny force in two, leaving half of it to hold the high ground and taking what amounted to two platoons of tanks down the hill toward the big bridge. Some small-arms fire came his way, despite his signal flares, but it only managed to force him back inside the turret.
Pang had moved his tanks over the bridge as soon as he saw the firefight on the opposite bank, and he awaited Shaxi just off the western approach to the bridge. The air-assault unit commander came out to meet Shaxi as well. The officers hugged each other, jumping up and down, oblivious to the nearby impact of artillery rounds that a single day before would have sent them scrambling for cover. Pang and Shaxi looked filthy, covered with oil and the residue of propellant. The air-assault lieutenant colonel looked even worse, grimed with blood, soot, and mud. It was all very much unlike the TV dramas about the War to Resist Japanese Aggression in terms of glamour, Shaxi thought, but the emotional power seemed incomparably greater.
The air-assault commander was disappointed to learn how few tanks Shaxi had with him, and he was alarmed to hear that they were virtually out of ammo. But Shaxi felt confident--surely, the enemy had received reports that Chinese armor had entered Gapyeong, and that would slow down any planned countermeasures until the enemy assessed the impact of the change in situation.
Shaxi ordered Pang to recross to the north bank and block any counterattacks from that direction, then he returned to properly position his remaining tanks against a threat from the south or east. Small-arms engagements continued in the center of the town, but the noise did not seem to worry the air-assault commander. The bridge, after all, was everything.
Now it was a matter of waiting to see who would arrive first--an enemy counterattack, or Chinese formations. Shaxi expected more high drama, perhaps even a sort of siege, but reality disappointed him. Small Chinese elements filtered in, while some recon elements pushed on to the south. Another forward detachment found its way through, and its battalion commander was disappointed that Shaxi had beaten him to the linkup. Regimental forward security detachments and advance guards arrived, often with vehicles from different units jumbled together. Lead elements from the Second Mechanized Corps arrived, demanding that their vehicles recieve unconditional right-of-way. The orders of march often made little sense, but within half an hour, enough combat power had crossed the Gapyeong bridge to hold the area against any counterattack the enemy was likely to launch. When Shaxi reestablished radio contact with his elements left behind at Gangchon-ri, he learned that other Chinese units were crossing there, as well.
Mission accomplished, Shaxi attempted to make out his after action report, huddled in the stinking interior of his tank. He was unsure about whether he was a war hero, or a war criminal.
Putting his fingers on the keyboard of his commander's laptop, he tapped the spacebar nervously, then decided to be as honest as possible about the situation that had gotten out of hand during the engagement amid the refugees. He did not intend to live with it as a secret, like one of the tormented characters in Rena's beloved novels. In any case, he doubted that it would be possible to hide it. It was too big, too terrible.
As he sent his report over the air-assault commander's long-range antenna, he remembered the girl in the torn blouse, and how her arm had flown high over a spray of blood in the moment before she fell. In his imagination, he saw each of her bony fingers, reaching higher and higher, even though she had been too far away for him to actually have made out the fine details his mind's eye now traced. Then the fleeing girl was Rena, reaching out to touch the coppery leaves of a birch tree in the Korean autumn, and it all made perfect sense to him as he fell into an iron sleep.
Next part here:
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=382314
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Your stamina is impressive.
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Are you turning this into an effort for the NaNoWriMo challenge? If so, you're doing a great job of it. Wow are you prolific.
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On November 15 2012 20:41 Aerisky wrote:
Are you turning this into an effort for the NaNoWriMo challenge? If so, you're doing a great job of it. Wow are you prolific.
Nah, just for fun.
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EPT
